


My Secret

by Haberdasher



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Endgame, Gen, Hulk (Marvel) Feels, Infinity Gauntlet, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Endgame, Smart Hulk (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 07:26:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18633550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: The Hulk after, well, everything.





	My Secret

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is set post-Endgame; major Endgame spoilers lie ahead. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Endgame, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.  
> Also, a disclaimer: I never actually saw the MCU Hulk film or Age of Ultron, both of which might be relevant here.

Bruce hadn’t gone into the details of how he had fused his human self (scrawny, genius) with his Hulk self (huge, emotional) with the other Avengers for a few reasons.

For one thing, the exact details of the process were very technical and very detailed and very, well, boring to those who didn’t share his scientific mind, and he didn’t think any of them would care to listen. The end result was what mattered to them. Bruce and Hulk, combined. Brains and brawn together in one. How he had gotten there was less important.

(Tony would have listened, Bruce realized too late. Tony would have understood it all, and maybe even discovered some minutiae that Bruce had managed to overlook in his fervor to create a better version of himself. But Bruce didn’t think to try, didn’t think to reach out and have that conversation until the option was no longer available.)

But hidden behind the dry scientific details was another reason Bruce never got into it, another reason Bruce didn’t care to share exactly what he had gone through.

The gamma radiation had basically split him in two, that much people knew, and anger unleashed the Hulk. But the split had gone further than that. Bruce was the genius with more Ph.D.s than the rest of the Avengers combined, but his emotional intelligence was, well, lacking; Hulk was the one who felt his emotions to the fullest and accepted them as they came without overanalyzing or second-guessing them.

But after eighteen months of work, Bruce realized that he could keep his intelligence and his emotions at the same time.

He was always angry, even fused. The Hulk couldn’t exist without his anger; that much hadn’t changed. But it was easy to be angry in a post-Thanos world, a world where untold trillions of lives had been ended in an instant by a madman with a half-baked scheme. Bruce figured he wasn’t the only one who spent those five years burning with anger, though maybe he was the only one among them who had learned to quietly accept that anger rather than either resisting it or wallowing in it.

Even after Thanos fell, though, even after half the world came back to life, Bruce remained angry. He was angry that Pepper had lost a husband, that Morgan had lost a father, that their loss couldn’t be reversed by the snap of a finger.

(He had tried to fix everything before Thanos came back, to reverse every loss that Thanos had caused. Bruce had to remind himself of that at times, though it was hard to forget, really, when one arm remained nigh-unusable because of it. He had done all that he could, had put on the Gauntlet and tried to set everything right, even though it wasn’t that simple, it could never be that simple. He couldn’t have known that more death and devastation was yet to come.)

He was angry about Nat, too. Angry that they had to make a sacrifice to get the Gauntlet in the first place, a sacrifice that could never be undone. Angry, though he would never admit it, that it had been Nat--Nat who understood him like nobody else, Nat who accepted both halves of him, Nat who he could have had a future with if things had gone ever so slightly differently.

(It was the right choice, though; logically, he knew the world was better off now than if Clint had been the one to fall. Clint had a family, a wife and kids waiting for him to return. Nat had... well, Bruce, and their unspoken thing together, but nobody depending on her in quite the same way.)

His anger burned and burned and burned as the world began putting itself back together, as people returned to their homes and their families...

Until he realized that this was the way things were, for better or for worse, and that this was the way things had to be. Doctor Strange had said as much, after checking some millions of possible futures and finding that this was the only one in which they beat Thanos for good.

Back in 2012, during the Battle of New York, Bruce’s secret had been that he was always angry, whether he let it show or not.

Now, though, Bruce’s secret was that his anger was fading away, slowly but surely, dwindling into a state of acceptance that wasn’t calm, exactly, but something close to it, resignation and understanding winning out over unthinking rage.

But even Bruce hadn’t realized the full implications of this gradual emotional shift until he woke up with clothes that were about five sizes too big, skin a pale peach instead of green, and an arm that stung with a sharp pain that overwhelmed his senses--a pain that only one other human had ever felt before, a pain that wasn’t meant for a mere human to withstand.


End file.
